1713 You Won’t Understand

BIG Life Devotional | Daily Devotional for Women

Have you ever come to the realization that you’ve been wrong? Girl, I had something so wrong. Almost embarrassingly wrong, because I’m pretty sure I taught it to you wrong too.

There’s a potential danger in plucking quotable verses out of the Bible and using them out of context. I’ve been guilty of that. I don’t think God is shaming me, because at least I was seeking his word. He hasn’t given me a guilt trip, but instead he’s taken me on a journey of knowing better. When you know better, you can do better.

Yesterday morning, I took myself to the most picturesque place on the island and sat down with my Bible to study. I had just finished studying Psalms and Proverbs, so my Bible seemed to naturally open where I left off. Although I’m not studying in any particular order, the next book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes and because I know of some quotable verses I’ve used before from this book, I decided that would be my next inspiring study.

I love verses like Ecclesiastes 3:12, “There is nothing better than to be happy and enjoy ourselves as long as we can.” I like happy. Happy people, happy days, happy scriptures, they all make me happy. Yesterday I was so excited to study more on this happy way of living, enjoying where we are and what we have just as God designed.

That sounds good, right? But did you know that’s totally NOT what Ecclesiastes is about? 98% of this book is NOT a guide for us to follow. These are not verses to be plucked out and quoted to apply to our lives. Here’s why … Ecclesiastes is written by Solomon. Yes, the son of King David who was chosen to become the next King at just 20 years old. Solomon, who felt so unequipped to become King, so he asked God for one thing … wisdom. Wisdom to lead well. Wisdom to know better. Wisdom to be pleasing to God. God was delighted with his request and blessed him to be the wisest man ever. Solomon had more wisdom than anyone else. Along with that he became wildly successful.

But Solomon lost his way. He lost his faith and he did the very thing God told him not to do. 1 Kings 11: 2-6, “The Lord had clearly instructed the people of Israel not to marry foreign women because they would turn their hearts to their gods. Yet Solomon insisted on loving them anyway. In Solomon’s old age, they turned his heart to worship other gods instead of being completely faithful to the Lord his God. Solomon did what was evil in the Lord’s sight; he refused to follow the Lord completely.”

This was the man blessed by God with more wisdom than anyone else. The man chosen to be King at a young age, set apart to do good. And, my friends, if the wisest man can lose his way, you better believe we can too! We too can get tripped up. We too can allow our feet to wander from God’s path. We can get things twisted in our heart and mind and end up doing the very things God has told us not to do.

When Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, he had fallen away from God. Without God as his guide, he had lost the true meaning of life. That’s why chapter 1, verse 1 begins with, “Everything is meaningless, completely meaningless!”

When we try to live life without God, everything becomes meaningless. Eventually, it all feels monotonous and pointless, like chasing the wind that you will never catch. What’s the point?

Really, what’s the point in trying when you don’t control the outcome? What’s the point in praying if God already knows what you need? What’s the point in living when the only sure event in each of our lives is dying, then the whole world will go on without us, and eventually we will be forgotten.

Nobody woke up this morning thinking about their great-great-great grandmother who made such incredible sacrifices 100 years ago that changed your life. She’s been forgotten. Her life was lived, then it was over, and everybody carried on. And the same will be true of you. Generations will come who no longer know your name, or your story, and you won’t seem to really matter. That’s just the truth. And this truth can make everything seem meaningless.

But, with God, EVERYTHING MATTERS. With the promise of eternity, this short life is no longer disappointing. We have hope. We have a point to living because there is sooooo much more. We have an eternal purpose.

But Solomon had fallen victim to frustrations and unanswered questions. So he wrote from a place of disappointment, stuck in his earthly perspective. I wish the entire book of Ecclesiastes had a bold header that said, “THIS IS YOUR LIFE IF GOD DOESN’T MATTER.”

From this perspective, Solomon wrote in chapter 1 verses 13-15, “God has dealt a tragic existence to the human race. I observed everything going on under the sun, and really, it is all meaningless – like chasing the wind. What is wrong cannot be made right. What is missing cannot be recovered.” BUT HE WAS WRONG.

We know that now, because we know Jesus. Jesus made what was wrong right. He went to Hell and fought for the keys to set the captives free. What was missing has been fully recovered. Our tragic existence has been radically rescued and now we know there is so much more beyond this life. Yes, the most certain fact about our existence here is our death. But our death is the beginning of eternity. And with Jesus, the best is yet to come.

Solomon felt everything was meaningless because he had temporarily lost his way with God. He had opened himself up to worshiping the gods of his foreign wives, exactly as God had told him not to do. So he was confused.

Maybe that’s where you are … you’re confused. You’re just not sure about this whole “God thing”. I mean really, if God is so good, why does he allow these bad things to happen? There are some really deep questions that seem to be unanswered here, so what if you go on a quest to get answers to all those questions about God?

Here’s what I’ve come to understand … we are each created with a God sized hole in us that only He can fill. We are made to seek relationship with him. Not understand him. God intentionally designed our existence to be meaningless without him. Out of divine love, he built within us the desire and need for the only thing that brings true meaning and fulfillment … HIM!

Without a fully devoted faith in God, confused by thinking there were other gods and other ways, Solomon began searching for meaning and fulfillment in all the other places. And that’s what we do too. That’s why we end up in the wrong relationships, with the wrong people and wrong things with wrong priorities, and wake up one day to realize what a mess we’ve made of our lives. We were searching, but when we search outside of God, we get lost.

That’s what the book of Ecclesiastes is really about. It’s about the search for meaning and fulfillment from an earthly perspective, without God’s promise of eternity. If this is all there is, my friends, it’s a disappointing ride that ends really sucky. YOU DIE.

Solomon’s search for meaning and fulfillment outside of God leads him to 3 things: Wisdom, Pleasure and Success.

For the next 3 days, we will look at each pursuit and see where it leads.

Today, we look at the pursuit of wisdom. That’s where Solomon started. And of course he did, he was the wisest man alive. He knew everything better than everyone else. This was his gift from God. But did you know, when unchecked and out of balance, our gift can become a curse? Our strength becomes our weakness when not managed.

Solomon’s strength was his wisdom. Chapter 1, verse 16-18, Solomon said to himself, “Look I am wiser than any of the kings who ruled in Jerusalem before me. I have greater wisdom and knowledge than any of them. So I set out to learn everything from wisdom to madness and folly. But I learned firsthand that pursuing all this is like chasing the wind. The greater my wisdom, the greater my grief. To increase knowledge only increases sorrow.”

The wisest man on earth learned more wisdom only made him unhappy.

Deuteronomy 29:29, “The Lord our God has secretes known to no one. We are not accountable for them, but we and our children are accountable forever for all that he has revealed to us, so that we may obey all the terms of these instructions.”

God has made known some things to us, and those things we are to be faithful with. But the rest, those are secrets only he knows. We’re not designed with the capabilities of understanding all the things of God.

Isiah 40: 28, “The Lord is the everlasting God and no one can fathom his understanding.” No one. Not Solomon, not me and not you. Our unending quest for understanding and answers only leaves us frustrated.

I know you’re dealing with some things that don’t make sense, and I’m so sorry for the hurt this has caused you. I’m so sorry for the nights you’ve cried in anguish saying, “God, why? Can you just tell me why?” And you still have no answers. My sister, we cannot understand the things of God, and the things he has kept a secret are not for us to know.

Solomon searched and searched for answers, and the more he searched, the harder he found faith to be.

Most every morning after my run, I take my dog swimming in the calm, turquoise waters here on the bay side of the island. There, I’ve been practicing float therapy. I lay stretched out on my back, with all of me underwater except for my nose and mouth, and I float. I listen to the sound of my breath, remembering the inhale is the YH and the exhale is the WH, speaking the name of God. It’s the most calming, restorative practice. Until Chris comes.

Chris is a rough around the edges fella who lives with his dog Bentley on a boat with no motor just off the shore. On most days Chris has had a little too much to drink and he’s generally upset about something. He’s on a mad quest to get answers to the questions that have been bothering him his whole life. He says he’s read the Bible 3 times and he knows there are things hidden from him and he wants to know more. He claims he’s going to Vatican City where he plans to dig through old archives and get the answers the rest of us idiots have decided we’re okay not having.

And to Chris, I calmly lift my head from the water and I say, “My friend, there are some things we’re not supposed to know. God has secrets which we are simply not designed to understand.”

Can we be okay with that answer? We won’t understand everyone or everything. Some things just don’t make sense. They don’t make sense because we are living with an earthly perspective in an eternal world.

One of my first mentors was Jim Rohn. Jim used to teach me about the things we couldn’t understand. He would say, I know you want to understand why liars lie, but maybe it’s because they’re liars, that’s what they’re supposed to do. They lie. You don’t have to figure that out.

Jim told me about the first sermon of Jesus where a large crowd gathered. Jesus taught the absolute truth and he taught it perfectly. But the response of the audience was mixed. Scripture says some heard it and were perplexed. Some heard it and were astounded. Some heard it and believed. Why? If they heard the same great truth presented in the same great way by Jesus, why the different responses? Well, the perplexed people are perplexed. The astounded people are the astounded. But the believers, they believed. And it doesn’t say that Jesus was all upset by it. It doesn’t even say that he tried to change it. He was looking for the believers, and he found some.

Will you just be a believer? A believer that doesn’t have to understand everything. A believer that doesn’t have to know why. But a believer who believers God is in everything and because he is, this is not meaningless.

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